The Shape of Comprehensiveness: 13,000 Data Providers and counting.

In the world of science, it’s common to talk about big numbers. Citation counts, impact scores, and download figures often dominate the conversation, somewhat controversially. But numbers on their own rarely tell the full story unless they’re connected to purpose.

As of 4th August 2025, CORE (Connecting Repositories), has surged past the direct data provider mark, a milestone that underscores both our accelerated growth and truly global coverage.  It’s tangible evidence of CORE’s constant growth and truly global coverage. Unlike some similar services, CORE’s figure reflects direct data providers, meaning that intermediaries such as DOAJ are counted once rather than tallying every individual journal, offering a clearer and more transparent measure of reach. At CORE, we actively curate, maintain, and support these data providers, ensuring they remain operational and fixing issues on a daily basis not only for our users, but for the benefit of the global repositories community. Unlike services that restrict themselves to content with registered (often paid-for) DOIs, we prioritise comprehensiveness and equal visibility of research outputs from all parts of the world. We share this number because it says something vital about the shape of open research and who is included in it. A perfect example is the groundbreaking paper Attention Is All You Need, which appears in CORE’s index via preprint repositories as a seminal work without a DOI, showcasing that critical research can be available outside of traditional commercial publishing channels. read more...

Looking Back, Stepping Forward: 15 Years of CORE in the Open Access Movement

Fifteen years ago, CORE (COnnecting REpositories) began as a PhD project with a simple but ambitious idea: to make open research more accessible, not just for humans, but for machines too. At a time when few could imagine tools like ChatGPT answering questions based on vast collections of scientific literature, it was already clear that the future of knowledge would depend on infrastructure capable of delivering information in ways both people and machines could understand. What followed was a decade and a half of learning, building, listening and working with the global research community to shape a more open, intelligent, and discoverable world of knowledge. read more...

CORE at Open Repositories 2025: Reflections from the Global Stage

Earlier this year, we shared our excitement ahead of the Open Repositories 2025 (OR2025) conference in Chicago. With a packed programme and growing momentum around open science infrastructure, CORE brought a series of contributions focused on the responsible use of AI, metadata innovation, and national-level repository coordination.

Now that the dust has settled and the conference has wrapped up, we’re taking a closer look at the sessions our team presented, the partnerships we strengthened, and the contributions we brought to the open repositories community. From addressing machine access to research content, metadata quality to AI-powered SDG classification and reproducibility, here’s a comprehensive summary of CORE’s significant presence at OR2025. read more...

CORE at Open Repositories 2025: Unlocking Insights and Empowering Open Access

CORE will be contributing seven accepted submissions to the 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025), taking place in Chicago, Illinois, USA, from 15–18 June 2025. These presentations highlight ongoing efforts to enhance open access, improve research discoverability, and address key challenges in the open repositories community.

From managing machine access in the era of generative AI to improving research classification and repository interoperability, each submission provides valuable insights for repository managers, academic institutions, and the wider open access ecosystem. read more...

Major update of CORE search 

CORE has just released a major update to its search engine, including a sleek new user interface and upgraded search functionality driven by the new CORE API V3.0.

CORE Search is the engine that researchers, librarians, scholars, and others turn to for open access research papers from around the world and for staying up to date on the latest scientific literature.

CORE constantly evaluates feedback from users and integrates this feedback as a part of the ongoing roadmap for CORE’s continued development. Working with our users and data providers to deliver a consistently improving user experience is a key component in CORE’s ongoing success. read more...

ON-MERRIT project has been featured in Nature

We are proud to announce that the work in our EU-funded project ON-MERRIT that aims to analyse and deliver a set of evidence-based recommendations for science policies, indicators, and incentives, which could address and mitigate cumulative (dis)advantages in Open Science has been mentioned in a Nature news article.

The work of the Open University, which is a partner in this project, focuses on the investigation of the role of Open Science in promotion and tenure policies, practices, and incentives within academia. At the OU, the project is led by the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group  (BSDTAg) with Dr. Petr Knoth (PI) supported by Dr. Nancy Pontika, David Pride, and Matteo Cancellieri.  read more...

Iris.ai and CORE cooperate to build AI Chemist

CORE and Iris.ai are extremely pleased to announce the initiation of a new research collaboration funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Discovering scientific insights about a specific topic is challenging, particularly in an area like chemistry which is one of the top-five most published fields with over 11 million publications and 307,000 patents. The team at Iris.ai have spent the last 5 years building an award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding. Their patented algorithms for identifying text similarity, extracting tabular data, and creating domain-specific entity representations mean they are world leaders in this domain.  read more...

Are you an iOS user? Access scientific articles in your device without hitting a paywall

Another year has passed and left a lot of good news, investigations and developments for CORE. Today we would like to tell you about one of them – Open Access (OA) Helper, an application developed for iOS mobile devices by Claus Wolf. We asked Claus to tell us how he came up with the OA Helper and here is what he answered.

When, where and why did you decide to develop OA Helper app? 

In October 2018, I learned about how open access discovery services connect users to legal Open Access copies of otherwise paywalled articles. The available plugins weren’t available for Safari, my preferred browser, so I decided to give creating one a try. read more...

CORE users can now read articles directly on our site

We are happy to announce the release of CORE Reader, which provides a seamless experience for users wishing to read papers hosted by CORE. In this post, we provide an overview of what is new and we encourage you to follow this development as new functionalities in the reader are on our roadmap.

At the beginning of this project, there was a reflection that most open access services do not yet provide a rich user experience for reading research papers. Determined to change this, we originally started looking at whether CORE could render research papers as HTML, as has recently become trendy across publisher platforms. While such rendering remains to be one of the ultimate goals, we realised that this could only be achieved for a small fraction of documents in CORE. More specifically, those that the data provider offers in machine readable formats, such as LaTeX or JATS XML. While we want to encourage more repositories to support such formats (and this remains to be a Plan S recommendation), we wanted to improve the reading experience for all of our users across all of our content. read more...